Mickelsson's Ghosts (44 page)

From the moment they passed through the high iron gates of the hospital grounds, nothing was real: time slowed down, shapes took on an extraordinary sharpness and a seeming weightlessness, or every shape but his uncle, who stood in his bathrobe and pajamas, unkempt, hollow-eyed, as firmly centered and infinitely heavy, though small of stature, as some innocent, terrifying image in a nightmare. Though he was thin, his whiskered flesh sagged on his face (that was the effect of some drug he had to take, Mickelsson's father said), and his hair was bristly, littered with something scaley, dandruff-like, though apparently it was not dandruff. But none of that had been as troublesome to look at as his eyes.

“Well,” Mickelsson's father would say as they drove home again, “I thought Edgar looked better, this time.” “Did you?” his mother would say, giving him a glance. “Well,” his father would say, as if it didn't much matter, really; eventually all would be well, that was the nature of things. Optimistic fatalist.

Mickelsson found himself standing in perfect darkness, in the pitch-dark shade of an abutment that rose steeply to give its heavy rock support to what was now empty air, below it the vast flat landfill floor that was once to have been the plaza. A perfect landing place for UFOs, he thought, and for a moment his memory entertained images from the final scenes of
Close Encounters.
In the blackness a few feet below him, invisible water lapped at the gravel, stone, and trash he stood on. For all the cold, the river had a smell, a fetidness like human bad breath. Across the flat, still river the black mountainside was beautiful with yellow houselights and cold white streetlights. The lights of a truck came slowly down the street, parallel to the river, then vanished behind trees and buildings. He half remembered, then brushed from his mind, the trucks he'd seen driving with their lights off. Maybe he'd dreamed the whole thing. A drunken nightmare.

He breathed deeply, clearing his head. How many times in fifty years, he asked himself, self-consciously, trying to pull back his earlier, sweeter mood, how many times did a man stand pondering in the night beside some river, remembering former nights, former rivers, counting up his losses? A man was never more alone, he thought, than when standing by himself looking at the lights of a community across a river, or across a lake, or from the deck of a ship. Had he thought exactly that same thought before, in exactly those same words, perhaps years ago? No, it came to him, he'd read them, or something like them: James Boswell looking at the stars before going up to his latest mistress. What a life! He turned to look up, ruefully, at the lights of Susquehanna.

And what if, for once, he, Mickelsson, were
not
to go up to his mistress? What if he were to take one small step toward bringing his life into control—reassert his dignity? It was community that kept one well and sane; that was the message of the book Michael Nugent had forced on him. Community was what he'd lost, leaving Providence, and what he'd fled, leaving Binghamton, and what called to him now in the form of yellow lights rising straight up the black wedge of mountain, lifting toward the lesser, gentler darkness of sky and embedded, icy stars.

He moved, frowning with thought, out of the shadow of the abutment onto the wide, gouged-out plaza site. His foolish infatuation was the heart and symbol of all that was wrong with him, his increasingly desperate embrace of chaos. It was she that made a clown of him, in Michael Nugent's sense, the imitation lover who gallantly allowed the whole town to laugh at him—anything for love!—middle-aged Mickelsson dressed up in ascot and threadbare formal coat for his teen-ager lady of the dark chipped tooth. Had he indeed gone mad, he asked himself. “Love for the unlovable.” Surely it was not true that he was one of those! Though he'd almost not dared to think about it, Jessica Stark had shown by certain signs that she was not entirely indifferent to him, there was at least a faint chance. Gail Edelman, dropping her gaze when he glanced at her, smiling at him with a hint of special interest when he politely passed the time of day with her—neither he nor she showing by any word or sign that they remembered the night of his drunken visit. … It was of course not real love that he felt for Donnie Matthews but some irrational need, some sickness. Rifkin would know. (He had not yet mentioned the matter to Rifkin.) It was his firm persuasion, as an ethicist—or almost firm—that one could choose right conduct, will the higher man's self-mastery, if one would, in spite of the witless heart's wail.

He stopped walking, standing in the middle, now, of the gouged-out desolation. It was true, he saw with sudden clarity: he must not go to her! His children and ex-wife had need of his money, the money he was squandering, these days, on Donnie Matthews. He stood with his hands pushed deep in his overcoat pockets, his shadow, thrown by the street-lamps above, stretching across the bulldozed span of gravel and bits of ice-speckled brick. It was decided, he would not go. He would walk back to the Jeep and drive home. Relief flooded through him. There was hope for him yet, then! Slowly, somewhat against his will, he drew his left hand from his pocket and raised it toward his face for a look at his watch.

Ten o'clock! Panic rushed up into his chest and all his wisdom melted. “Shit,” he whispered, and began to walk with quick strides back in the direction of the bridge. It was surprisingly far away. After a moment he began to run. He began to breathe hard, then cough as he ran—too much smoking—but he continued to run.

When he was inside her apartment, the door closed and locked behind him, he shook his overcoat loose and let it fall to the floor, Donnie Matthews staring at him with eyes full of alarm. He stood cocked forward like a maniac, breathing in gasps and rubbing his chest with his clenched right fist.

“Peter, you shouldn't have run,” she said, “you knew I'd wait for you!”

She wore a white, Greek-looking dress and the amber beads he'd bought for her, no shoes on her small, perfect feet. Her skin shone, lightly perspiring from her recent bath; her hair was still slightly wet. She put her arms around him and pressed the side of her face to his chest, pushing his fist away, taking its place, moving her cheek against him hard, massaging him. “Peter, poor, crazy, crazy Peter,” she murmured. He wrapped his arms around her, clinging for dear life. Her left hand moved to his erection, then unzipped his fly, freeing his straining penis. His heart whammed still harder. Unquestionably, she'd be the death of him. She slid down on his body, sinking to her knees, and took him in her mouth. He straightened up, arching his back, still gasping for breath. When he began to thrust, she rose, lifted the skirt of her dress—she had nothing underneath—and climbed up onto him, helping him in with one hand. Tears ran down his face. How many men's sperm did that warm cave contain? That was Peter Mickelsson's community: a thousand dark, writhing lives, unfulfilled, unfulfillable. He came, her legs froze around him, and—this time, anyway—he did not die.

As she put up with other things, she put up with his talk. Lying on his back beside her, early in the morning, after sleeping for hours without moving even a finger, like a dead man—one arm under her head now, the other thrown across his eyes—he told of old Pearson's visit, then of the visit of the Mormons.

“Strange people,” she said, and opened her eyes for a moment as if thinking something unpleasant.

“Why so?” he asked, then lowered his wrist to his eyes again.

“I don't know. How can they
believe
that stuff? I mean, it's
all
a lot of bullshit, but with those other religions you can see how people might be taken in, because the weird stuff all happened so long ago. But Joseph Smith! People around here actually knew him—knew what an asshole he was. My own great-great-grandfather had dealings with him, or so my grandfather used to say. Said he was tricky as a snake.”

“You had a grandfather?”

“Most people do. He lived in Lanesboro when there were still Indians around, except the Indians lived in Red Rock. There used to be this Indian that would come into town once a year, or maybe twice, I forget—he didn't live with the others, in Red Rock, he lived in the woods. He'd go to Mireiders' Store—it wasn't Mireiders' then—and he'd make a big pile of all the things he needed, and he'd find owt how much it came to and then he'd walk back into the woods and he'd come back owt the next day and pay his bill in gold coins. My grandfather had a dream one time, that the Indian dug the coins owt of a bank up by the viaduct. He always meant to go look there and see if the dream was true, but he never got around to it, and when he died he'd never showed anybody where it was.”

“Do you have parents?” Mickelsson asked.

She was silent for a while. At last she said, “The Mormons always play like they're stupid and sweet, but really they're mean sons of bitches, or anyway most of 'em are. I guess even the sweet ones have to know what the other ones are doing, and I guess if they put up with it they're naht so sweet either.”

He smiled, still with his eyes closed, hidden under his arm. “What do they do, these mean ones?”

“Torture people. Harris them.”

“Harass.”

“Well, however you say it.”

“How do you know they harass people?”

“I know, don't worry.” She spoke petulantly, as if she didn't know, in fact.

Mickelsson drifted toward sleep for a moment, then drifted back up into consciousness, thinking of the shabby, pitiful Mormons at his door. “They're a strange people,” he said. “We all work from premises we can't fully defend, but the Mormons are true, deep-down absurdists.”

“Mmm,” she said; then, after a moment: “What do you mean?”

He turned his face to hers, then rolled over toward her, conscious of how huge he was, in comparison to her—how wasted, gross. No doubt that had to do with his heart's choice of her: since he paid her, it need not concern him that he was old and fat. He stroked the side of her forehead and cheek with the fingertips of his right hand. She stopped him, holding the hand in hers. “What do you mean, ‘absurdists'?”

“They're people that know that nothing makes sense, the whole universe is crazy, or so they claim, but they go right on acting as if things make sense.” He drew his hand free of hers and touched her face again. Could it be true, as Ellen claimed, that all women hate to be touched? He said, “The Mormons start with this insane, made-up history—Jesus Christ coming to someplace like Peru, where he meets not only Indians but also white people who look exactly like Charlton Heston playing Moses—and out of this craziness they make a huge, rich church, complete with army and police, or anyway so people will tell you out in Utah; they make a whole new style of architecture, new theory of the universe, new system of family relationships. … It's an amazing accomplishment, when you think about it. They've stepped out of normal time and space, and so far as you can tell, most of 'em aren't even aware of the fact.”

“All religions are like that,” she said. Again she stopped his hand.

“I don't know. The Mormons seem pretty special. Anyhow, they take care of each other. There's something to be said for that.”

“I'd just as soon take care of myself,” she said, and closed her eyes.

He drew his hand back and lay still, looking at her eyelashes, the faint suggestion of veins in her forehead, feeling gloom rise in him, recalling to him its cause, that soon he must leave her.

It was true, Mickelsson thought: she really would just as soon take care of herself. A true, natural feminist—unless perhaps she'd gotten her ideas from TV. All at once he thought he understood something. She would talk with him for hours as if with interest, sometimes closely watching his face as he answered some question she'd put to him, exactly as she would do if she cared about his opinion, that is, loved him; yet she insisted, over and over, that she did not love him—
liked
him, certainly; liked everyone, why not?—but love: no; never. She's wrong, he thought, and felt his heart lift. She's lying to herself, from her fear of entrapment. How she could love him—how anyone could love him—was a question he did not feel up to this morning; but suddenly he was absolutely sure that she did indeed love him. In the crisp morning light, the cracked paint on the window sash was like writing, like some form of Arabic. His eyes moved on to the wallpaper, dark gray and green on a base so yellowed it looked scorched. The tight wallpaper design looked as though it, too, might be writing. He looked at the pattern of veins in her chest and thought—not quite seriously but seriously playing with the possibility—that at any instant, if in some way his mind-set could be minutely shifted, she too would be language, all mysteries revealed.

“I have to go,” he said.

She nodded, still with her eyes closed. “I'm glad you came.”

He eased up onto the side of the bed, reached down for his socks, and put them on, then got into his undershorts and shirt.

She asked, half sitting up, “Peter, could you hand me that plastic pill thing on the dresser?”

He did. It was a pink plastic, numbered birth-control-pill dispenser. She thanked him, got out a pill, then whispered, “Shit.”

“What's the matter?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I forgot my damn pill yesterday,” she said. “Don't worry, I'll just take two today. It's all right. Don't look so panicky!” She laughed, delighted by the no doubt old-maidish look of horror on his face. “It's all right, believe me. It's happened before. Don't worry about ole Donnie, kiddo! She's strictly professional!”

“Christ, I hope so,” he said. He put on his shoes.

She lay back, moving over into the middle of the bed, now that he was out of it, and spread her legs wide. She smiled, not enough to let the broken tooth show. “Think of me,” she said, then pursed her lips as if to kiss the air.